Stories

Category: Video

  • Tech Change

    Tech Change

    The Institute for Technology and Social Change is a private company based in Washington, D.C. Its web site offers a course catalogue focused on technological innovation. Timo Luege is a communication specialist who has spent the last seven years working for the humanitarian and development sector, a period during which large-scale disasters intersected with the rapid rise in mobile communication. Starting on Monday, he will be delivering TechChange’s course on technology tools and skills for emergency management for the third time.

    In this interview he answers the following questions:

    1. What will I be able to do after taking the course that I couldn’t do before?
    2. Why should my manager pay for this, or at least support me?
    3. Why should my staff development or HR people support me to take this course?
    4. How will this help me to deliver for my organization – or to find my next job or mission?
    5. Humanitarian training focuses on technical skills, yet everyone recognizes the need for critical thinking and analytical skills. Do you think that your course can help with these and if so how?
    6. Is TechChange accredited and, if not, why not deliver this course through a traditional university?
    7. How does a communication specialist become an online instructor?
    8. What is your experience of teaching online?

    Timo assisted in teaching the first iteration of the course before taking the helm, and dedicates two full weeks to preparation for the course. This is especially important as he covers fast-changing topics. A number of guests are invited to deliver online presentation and contribute to discussions. Although there is no group work, there are many opportunities for interaction. The learning environment is a custom-built job on top of WordPress. The cohorts are typically between 20 and 30 learners, with a broad diversity of people and countries represented.

    The fees for the course are US$445, but if you are interested, ping me (or Timo) on Twitter (or use the contact form on this blog) and I will share a code you can use to get a US$100 discount.

    From my vantage point, I connected with Timo to chat about this course which I found profoundly interesting for reasons that should not surprise regular readers of this blog:

    • It aims to offer most-current knowledge in an area of innovation where the “half-life” of knowledge is short (and in fact Timo mentions that he finds it necessary to thoroughly update his content each time he runs the course).
    • It has been developed outside of in-service training and of traditional universities, with knowledge based on practitioner expertise acquired through experience
    • It is offered by a private company, leveraging relationships to the technology, humanitarian and development sectors.

    On the other hand:

    • It is neither open (free) nor massive (and doesn’t try to be), and therefore difficult to scale up.
    • The pedagogical model appears to contain some elements of constructivist and experiential learning, but still appears very focused on information transmission.
    • The value of the credential remains to be demonstrated with respect to applicability to work, performance outcomes, and recognition by HR departments and managers.
    • It is unclear if or how learners interact during and after the course to form a knowledge community.
    • The cost structure and business model are difficult to determine without first chatting with the TechChange team.

    Please note that I have never taken a TechChange course and have not (yet) met their team, so these are only my first impressions, from the outside, looking in.

     

     

     

     

  • Webcasts, then and now

    Webcasts, then and now

    (No, this is not a post about the Apple keynote meltdown.)

    When I started organizing live webcast events for the first time in 2006, they required extensive technical preparation, specialized software and hardware, and – most important – a group of really smart people gifted with more than a little bit of luck to pull off each event. Even as recently as 2011, I remember a time in Budapest when my young cameraman (one of a team of four) announced to me that his fancy P2 broadcast-quality camera could not connect to his equally-fancy webcasting software. I ended up hacking our MacBook Pro’s webcam, piloted remotely from another laptop using VNC… It was exciting to transform what had been a local, 19th Century-style lecture series into a series of global participatory learning events, but so much energy had to be expended on the technical issues that many people missed the point about the amazing affordances of technology to fundamentally transform how we teach and learn.

    Participants in today’s blended learning event (a “15-Minute Global Health Practicum”) still experienced the technology mediation as interference. However, the blurry video and mediocre sound came from the crappy hotel wifi of our presenter, and nothing else. We were nevertheless able to focus on the substance (games for health) and the learning process  (a 5-minute Ignite presentation). I spent little more time testing and checking the Google Hangouts than I did visiting the meeting room where we gathered for the event in Geneva. Hence my effort went into reimagining how to solve some of the learning problems, not the technical ones.

    For future events, the lesson for me is that figuring out how much of a burden  technology is likely to be (as it remains across the Digital Divide, for example) should really be a first diagnostic step when planning such events. Then you can determine where to focus your efforts.

    Having said that, note to self: Crappy hotel wifi may be a rich people problem, but it really sucks. Sorry, Ben.

  • Walking with a drone

    Walking with a drone

    We went up the Semnoz this afternoon, taking our two-and-a-half year old baby on a no-pram-allowed walk for the first time. In addition to the usual suspects (cows and goats, mostly), we also ran into Benoit Pereira Da Silva, an application developer at the helm of a contraption he uses to code and walk at the same time. If I understood correctly, he has programmed the drone to document his walks. Today, his 13-year-old son manually guided a small, buzzing quadcopter equipped with an onboard camera to capture HD footage.

    Our baby sized up the little machine and its four buzzing rotors, perhaps with his recent interactions with the family Roomba (plastic and metal, moves and makes noise) and the flies (the buzzing and flying things around the cows) as reference points. Given the accelerating pace of technological change (cf. The Second Machine Age), I’m expecting that he will be growing up in a world populated by new kinds of autonomous machines – and that this world may arrive sooner than we think. Never mind that, so far, drones have been mostly associated with killing children.

  • Meet Barbara Moser-Mercer, the lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp

    Meet Barbara Moser-Mercer, the lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp

    I first heard her described as the “lady who did MOOCs in a refugee camp”. It was completely ambiguous what that meant, but certainly sparked my curiosity. Barbara Moser-Mercer is a professor at the University of Geneva and a  cognitive psychologist who has practiced and researched education in emergencies.

    I finally caught up with her at the Second European MOOC Summit.

     

  • Fahamu

    Fahamu

    Fahamu Pecou (b. 1975) is an artist/scholar based in Atlanta, Georgia whose works comment on contemporary and hip-hop culture while simultaneously subverting it to include his ideas on fine art.

  • Teaching logistics with haptic feedback

    EPFL’s Professor Pierre Dillenbourg heads the Center for Digital Education. He demonstrates the use of a Simpliquity Tinkerlamp to teach logistics training, and explains how research has moved from developing an expensive, specialized device to using a simple webcam and paper. Note: interview and discussion are in French.

  • Masooda Bano: the impact of international aid on volunteering and development

    The negative impact of aid on development has been a recurring and controversial subject in recent years. Drawing on her extensive research in this field, Masooda Bano asserts that there is a strong negative correlation between foreign aid, and voluntary organisations’ ability to mobilise communities.

    Masooda Bano is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Department of International Development & Wolfson College, University of Oxford, with a DPhil from Oxford and MPhil from Cambridge. Her work focuses on real life development puzzles with a focus on mapping the micro-level behaviour and incentive structures drawing on rich empirical data especially ethnographic studies.

    Dangerous Correlations: Aid’s Impact on NGOs’ Performance and Ability to Mobilize Members in Pakistan